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Friday, June 15, 2018

Dystopian Fiction: Part 4

Dystopian
Fiction: Part 4

Joe Bonadonna

As
I mentioned when I first started out in Part 1, I haven’t read a dystopian
novel in decades, probably not since the early 1980s, at the latest — unless
you count Stephen King’s Cellor some zombie apocalypse
novels. So I’m really no expert authority or even very knowledgeable about
novels published in the last decade of the 20th century, let’s say,
and especially those published in the 21st century. Typing “21st
century” is still rather strange for me: the future is now, sort of thing, and
probably because I spent the first 50 years of my life living in the last 5
decades of the 21st century. I am truly a product of those years,
especially of the 1960s.

What
I hope to accomplish here is list some books I have heard of but have never
read, and list a number of films I’ve seen. In
my experience, dystopian fiction was
usually a science fiction novel set in a dark, grim future, and long before the
label was attached to these. In these novels the future usually involved
totalitarianism in one form or another: fascist, oligarchic, and religious
regimes; sometimes alien invasions by some good old extraterrestrial space
invaders, or a plague or horrific proportions were the catalysts, as depicted
in such novels as Footfall, by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, and in I Am
Legend, by Richard Matheson. Many other novels had strong science
fiction tropes, combined with a dystopian backdrop: The Missing Man, by
Katherine MacLean; The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester; After Things Fell Apart,
by Ron Goulart, The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. LeGuin; Alternaties, by Michael
Kube-MacDowell; Time Storm, by Gordon R. Dickson; Planet of the Apes (a/k/a
Monkey Planet), by Pierre Boulé; The Masks of Time, and The
Word Inside, by Robert Silverberg; Riders of the Purple Wage, by Philip
Jose Farmer (originally published in Dangerous
Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison); and almost anything by Philip K. Dick. The
works of Ayn Rand, too, can be said to be of dystopian futures, but I must
confess that I have never read her work.

There
are scores of novels I’ve heard of but have never read, and surely scores of
titles I never even heard of. It seems to me, however, that the 21st
century has brought dystopian fiction to a whole new level of popularity. Why
more and more writers are turning out dystopian fiction, and why more and more
readers are picking up on them, I can’t really say for certain. Perhaps it’s
the political climate in the USA and the surrounding world. Perhaps the genre’s
time has come: where once rocket ships to other planets and space exploration
were the thing, and time travel a popular trope, the many worlds of Dystopia
are now being explored. And why I can sit and watch a movie about
a dystopian future but cannot read any more novels about dystopian futures is a
complete mystery to me. Perhaps it’s because a book is totally subjective, and
all you have with you when you’re reading are the author’s words and your own
imagination. Thus, the novel affects you on a different level, perhaps several
levels. With a film, you get visuals, music, sound FX, special FX, actors
playing out their roles . . . and all that puts the story on a different level
for me, and at times keeps me distracted from the dark, grim, near hopeless
core of the story. I don’t know. I have never written a dystopian novel,
although I have written my own “zombie apocalypse” screenplay, back in 1997.
But that falls more into the horror genre, anyway. Perhaps fans and authors of
dystopian fiction will give me some insight into why they read and write these
novels. And who knows? Perhaps if a inspiration strikes me with an idea and a
plot that intrigue me enough, something I haven’t seen or heard of before, then
maybe I’ll write one.

Here,
in no particular order . . . is a very incomplete list of all the “old” and
more recent dystopian movies I’ve seen.

Metropolis, by Fritz Lang

La Jettee, by Chris Marker

The Last Man on Earth, starring
Vincent Price (based on Richard Matheson’s I
Am Legend.)

Well,
there you have my 2-cents worth. There are certainly many other films that can
be considered dystopian futures, such as Terminator,
Robocop, A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), and far too many more novels to
mention. I just hope you’ve enjoyed my articles, learned about some novels and
movies you may not have known about, and you’ll stop by again some time.